Turkey must confront its past

Leader
Sunday January 21, 2007
_The Observer_ ()

Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, was last week gunned down
outside the offices of the newspaper he edited. His offence was to
write about the deaths of millions of Armenians forcibly displaced
during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, and treat it for what it
was – a crime. To call it a genocide is not unreasonable, but it is
illegal in Turkey. It constitutes an ‘insult’ to the nation, a crime
for which Dink was convicted in 2005 and for which many other Turkish
writers and journalists have been jailed.

Thousands of Turks have rallied to express their horror at the
killing.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rightly described it as a ‘bullet
fired at democracy’. But Turkey is a strange kind of democracy, where
secularism comes attached to militant nationalism and a personality
cult around Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the post-Ottoman founder of the
country. To demean him is also a crime.

The brittleness of this system, and the injustice it engenders, are
key reasons why the European Union is cautious in negotiations over
Turkey’s bid to join the club. EU membership is conditional on, among
other things, progress in respecting basic human rights.

The Turkish state is, of course, not responsible for Mr Dink’s
death. But official reluctance to allow open discussion of inglorious
episodes in the country’s past creates a climate in which journalists
are easily branded traitors. That must change, not just for the sake
of Turkey’s EU membership, but out of respect for the majority of
Turks, who were outraged by Mr Dink’s killing and who deserve a freer
democracy.